Quantifying Social Media’s Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: We demonstrate that social media data represent a useful resource for testing models of legislative and individual-level political behavior and attitudes. First, we develop a model to estimate the ideology of politicians and their supporters using social media data on individual citizens’ endorsements of political figures. Our measure allows us to place politicians and more than 6 million citizens who are active in social media on the same metric. We validate the ideological estimates that result from the scaling process by showing they correlate highly with existing measures of ideology from Congress, and with individual-level self-reported political views. Finally, we use these measures to study the relationship between ideology and age, social relationships and ideology, and the relationship between friend ideology and turnout.
Authors: ROBERT BOND, SOLOMON MESSING
Institutions: The Ohio State University, Meta (United States)
Language: English
Topic: Social Media and Politics
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: University of Cambridge
OpenAlex ID: W2163504599